Cable operators have widely deployed high-speed data services on cable television systems. These data services allow subscriber-side devices, such as personal computers, to communicate over an ordinary cable TV network Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC) cable. Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. (CableLabs®) publishes detailed technical specifications for such systems, including DOCSIS—Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification. See, for example, CM-SP-MULPIv3.0-108-080522, hereafter referred to generally as DOCSIS 3.0.
Performance is improved by spreading or “load balancing” traffic over the available channels. In DOCSIS 2.0, load balancing was achieved by simply allocating the available channels across the modems for a given CMTS. For example, given 4 channels and 80 modems, a balanced system would allocate 20 modems per channel.